Yes, I'm still here

Continuing my trip back through the 1965 album charts.

04/04/65 : Cilla - Cilla Black


This is our second visit with Cilla - last time it was a fun enough trip but I was surprised at some of the issues around her singing, so I'm expecting more of the same here.

Yeah, it's fun enough but the singing surprise here is that in some places she has a really nice voice. But only in some places because for most of it they just have her belting it out, which doesn't work so well - "Come To Me" (one of the few original tracks on here) is particularly dreadful and "Ol' Man River" ain't much better. It's the usual mix of a sprinkling of original songs written by various random people and covers, giving us our second versions this year of "Dancing In The Street" (our previous visit was by The Kinks, but it was also covered by The Walker Brothers, The Everly Brothers, Brenda Lee and Petula Clark in this year alone!) and "Love Letters" (previously by Sandie Shaw) - Cilla does a good job with "Love Letters". I liked bits of this album, but as a whole her voice was just too grating too often for it to be a generally enjoyable experience.

We're at #13 in the chart this week on her ninth week of an eleven week run, with it having peaked at #5 in its fourth and fifth weeks. The top five this week were The Rolling Stones, The Beatles, Bob Dylan, The Kinks and Val Doonican and we have two new entries for TSOM (#17 - the first of 372 weeks it would spend in the charts) and Jim Reeves (#19 - the first of 5!).

Wikipedia doesn't have a lot on the album - it was her debut (we've had a lot of debuts this year) and it was produced by George Martin. A couple of interesting names pop up as writers - Bobby Willis, who was Cilla's manager and went on to become her husband and Kenny Lynch, who was always on Celebrity Squares when I was growing up, but I learned also accompanied The Beatles on their first US tour.

"Customers also listened to" Gerry & The Pacemakers, Lulu, The Walker Brothers and Ken Dodd - a somewhat odd mix. And Cilla has produced an odd album here - her voice in lovely in places, but unfortunately they're few and far between and it's really quite annoying for most of the rest of it. 

28/03/65 - Nicely different
11/04/65 - Really not good

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